Wipro Technologies lines up slew of products for social benefits like electro-cardiogram necklace, tablet computer

BANGALORE: Wipro Technologies has identified education and health care as the next big business opportunities as it prepares to launch a host of low-cost products such as an electro-cardiogram necklace, tablet computer and cameras for use in hospitals and in mining and retail.

India's third-largest IT services company is one of the largest outsourced R&D services providers and is leveraging these capabilities in bringing out these products. An ECG necklace is a device worn by the patient around the neck. It transmits heartbeats to a remote-monitoring location.

Wipro, which got on board a new chief technology officer earlier this year, will develop and test these products over the next 12-24 months for manufacturers who will market them on their own or in partnership with the IT firm.

Apart from the licensing revenues, the big opportunity for Wipro will be in the services contracts around deploying, operating and managing these products, Anurag Srivastava, Chief Technology Officer & Senior Vice-President, Wipro Global IT Business, said.

The company can stay with the product throughout its eco-system starting from device innovation to developing applications around the products and the IT services required to support the applications.

Targeted at the Indian market, Wipro will work on the twin challenges of making these products affordable and within reach for the masses as well as small enough to be used conveniently. To begin with, the company has identified health care, education and energy as the three areas for its products.

It has also tied up with Belgiumbased research centre IMEC that will provide the knowhow which Wipro can adapt for the Indian market. Tie-ups like these will also help Wipro cut down on the large costs required to develop these products.

"We are working on three projects to begin with, for which the pilots will be done in the next 12-14 months. Hyper-spectral imaging will be used to build cameras that can detect textures to tell you the properties of a product, for instance it can be used for checking if a food product is old or new or identify minerals in soil.

An ECG necklace will closely montior cardiac activity and can be used for remote diagnostics. And finally, a problem-specific low-cost tablet aimed at the education sector," Srivastava said.

The company intends to use nanotechnology to miniaturise and integrate these products in mobile devices to make them easier to use and more accessible. The company has also set up a lab in partnership with IMEC that will eventually work with manufacturers and academic institutes to develop newer products.

The addressable opportunity for Wipro will be large government contracts or projects with hospitals and mining firms that could be fixed price or outcome based. The company could bid for these contracts through its Wipro Infotech division that focuses solely on the domestic market in products and services.

Wipro is the second-largest player in the Indian domestic IT services market after IBM and gets over $1 billion of its total $7-billion revenue from the domestic division.